Science Forums 2

[KickAssClown]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

Reminds me of something that happened long ago at Texas Instruments.

[...]

Our lead programmer came up with something novel -- he took the breakdown structure (BDS) of an existing language -- a very simple one -- and wrote a small assembly program that read in the BDS as input -- and then it would read in any program written in that higher level language, and reduce it to assembler.

[...]

We got to playing with this, writing little routines in our new hi-level language (HLL) until somebody realized that the BDS text was in a buffer in the computer while executing the HLL. It was trivial then to make a small adjustment in the BDS.

[...]

This meant that in mid-program, we could change the rules of the language and use the new rules immediately.
Eventually, we got it so we could add or delete options from any given line of BSD without having to redefine the whole line. We did this by defining a few new lines of BSD which gave us operators for selecting a specific option within an existing BSD line, and for searching the BSD line by line, option by option.

We had a LOT of fun doing this, but it didn't come to much. We didn't have the time to spend all day experimenting with it, and producing something that wouldn't crash the whole computer was a really big challenge.

But the possibilities...

Thank you, Pyrotex. I've added this to my list of things to research. It sounds like this would lend itself handily to a language of languages. What would you call an operator which does what you describe? I would very much like to implement this with bounds into the language as a standard operator.

By the way, I'm looking for a name for the language of languages. The candidates I've come up with are: "Dialectics", "Uni-lex", "Babel", "GEB", "Tangle", or "Polyglot". Now that I think about it, maybe the language should be implemented in dialects?